By Andy Brack
A funny thing happened on the way to a presidential election. South Carolina Republicans, typically loud and brash in their support of former President Donald Trump, fell mostly silent after his abysmal debate performance against Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
Perhaps the echo of silence was because they were just stunned how poorly the debate went for Trump. There was no onslaught of press releases, tweets or social media snippets spewing support for Trump. We didn’t hear from S.C. .Gov. Henry McMaster – the guy who has often bragged how he was the first state official to back Trump more than eight years ago.
Most of the S.C. GOP delegation were titmouses, although U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, never one to bypass the opportunity to be in the press, did holler about President Joe Biden again. (Yes, the guy who isn’t a candidate.) She said, “Joe Biden set the bar low enough to bunny hop over it and she still somehow managed to limbo underneath.”
About the only other Trump ally from South Carolina in sight was U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham who took to the post-debate spin room to bemoan how the former president missed opportunities in the debate.
“I told him: ‘Your closing was great. If you do another debate, just effectively prosecute what you had and where we’re at,’” Graham said to Politico, referring to the country before and after Trump.
Activity was so timid in the spin room that even Trump showed up to try to bolster the perception that his lackluster performance was better than it was.
But all of America saw the former president for who he has become – little more than an angry, tired, orange marionette spitting robotic venom. Any charm he might have had in the past seemed to have evaporated in a cloud of 78-year-old vitriol.
So it’s no wonder there was little Republican glee. They’re still shellshocked about a party leader who is the butt of Internet memes after he falsely claimed that cats and dogs were being eaten by migrants in Ohio.
Meanwhile, Democrats bounced off the satellites, perhaps a bit too gleefully, as they celebrated how Harris baited and goaded Trump time and again, knocking him off his game.
“Kamala Harris is the future and Donald Trump is the past,” said Sam Skardon, chair of the Charleston County Democratic Party after the debate. “We got one step closer to the future tonight.”
Harris, called weak and stupid by the former president for weeks, showed she was anything but – righteously hammering the kinds of facts, numbers, proposals and details that are typical of political events.
And while the candidates danced back and forth about issues, what Americans really saw were two performances that couldn’t have been more different – Harris in control, effectively making point after point, and Trump veering wildly, becoming the caricature that he painted Biden to be just weeks earlier.
For the next two months, Trump will continue to flail away at Harris but the Tuesday debate might have been his last big hurrah. By showing his true self to the American people, he may have unwittingly tipped the balance in the close election to Harris as his behavior ticked off too many voters, particularly those in swing states.
So when they hear the crazy political charges that are sure to come, they might just wonder whether there’s any basis in what he’s saying.
And then Fido or Kitty might walk by. And they’ll remember what Trump said about pets in Ohio.
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report and the Charleston City Paper. Have a comment? Send it to feedback@statehousereport.com.
